If you feel as if you’re in a play, you are anyway: ‘Beautiful Ruins’ by Jess Walter – Book Recommendation

In 1962, a young man briefly hosts an American actress at his hotel on the Italian coast, having been told that she is dying. Fifty years later, he arrives in Hollywood to find out what became of her. Leaping backwards and forwards across time and continents by way of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton in Cleopatra, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, World War II, and nineteenth-century American pioneers resorting to cannibalism, Beautiful Ruins shows us life at its most extraordinary, mundane, shattering, and uplifting.

Author Jess Walter describes his novel as ‘a story about fame and how we all endeavour now to live our lives like movie stars’, which seems particularly pertinent in today’s social media-driven world. However, human consciousness has probably always led each of us to instinctively see life as a story in which we are the main protagonist. Each of us is, after all, at the centre of our life’s experiences. Unfortunately, like one of Walter’s characters, you may end up feeling that ‘the more you live the more regret and longing you suffer [and] that life [is] a glorious catastrophe’. Here, Walter echoes the oxymoronic title of his novel, emphasising the wonder and absurdity of our existence. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Hollywood, and Walter combines satire and fairytale in a very movielike way that is designed to make you laugh and cry and sigh all at the same time. It’s a story in which hope and despair meet with failure and success, and the ambitious with the unassuming. Beautiful Ruins makes you reflect on what life is really about and what you really want to get out of it, alongside the ultimate question for all of us: what constitutes a happy ending?

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter ISBN: 9780241986509